For those of you who don’t know, in addition to coaching softball, being a softball peak performance coach, I’ve also been teaching at the community college level for the past 10 years or so.
I currently teach nutrition, sports conditioning, and weight training classes.
I’ve also taught sports psychology and a few other fitness-related PE classes in the past.
Last week, in one of my nutrition classes, we were doing our traditional food log analysis.
I asked my students to keep a detailed food and exercise log for a whole week. After that, we input all the data into a popular online tracking software and look at the results.
This is the most significant exercise of the semester as students get to learn a lot about their own eating habits and are often shocked at what they find out!
One of my students is a 6’3″, 18-year-old talented female basketball player that plays for the college team.
We were looking at her numbers and what she discovered blew her away.
Her estimated daily caloric expenditure is around 4000 calories which is totally normal for such a tall and active elite athlete of that age.
Her daily caloric intake for that week was around 2600 calories.
That’s a 1400-calorie deficit per day! This is huge!
This is really bad news for an elite athlete.
Talking to her, i learned that she is often tired and has a hard time focusing in class, especially in the afternoon.
And at that time, she had a cold that just wouldn’t go away.
Guess what?
All of that might have surprised her but I was not surprised one bit.
This is VERY TYPICAL of student-athletes.
Most of them are so busy with school and training that they don’t eat enough.
And a lot of the time, they don’t eat well either.
And then they expect to perform well!
Try to run a car without gas – you will not go too far.
You’ve got to feed the machine!!! And you’ve got to feed with good stuff, not crap like highly processed or fast food.
You have to eat more, eat more often, and make better choices more often if you want to perform well.
And guess what – nutrition does play a role in softball, especially when you train regularly and play at a high level.